Red All Over

When I was a little girl, this old chestnut was one of my favorite riddles... "What's black and white and read all over?"

"A newspaper!"

That riddle is outdated in more than one way these days.  Newspapers are definitely not "read all over" like they were in the 1960's.

But that's food for another post.

Today, I'm talking about red literally, as in the color red.  In an effort to brighten the grey winter landscapr and lift my downtrodden spirits, I've proclaimed February my personal red month.  That's right. I'm wearing red everyday this month, even if it's only my red-banded wristwatch.

It  all started the other day, when I wore a red sweater in honor of  National Wear Red Day, an event sponsored by the American Heart Association to raise awareness about women's heart health.  Many of you probably know this statistic, but it bears repeating...more women die from heart disease than from any other disease, including breast cancer.  It also bears repeating that heart attacks don't present the same symptoms in women as they do in men and thus are often overlooked when women go in for treatment, even into the emergency room.  If you haven't educated yourself about heart disease in women, this is the month you can read about it all over...

My literal heart is just fine, but this winter my emotional heart has been hurting.  I been hit hard with SAD (seasonal affective disorder).  This is one of the coldest, grayest, snowiest winters I can remember, and it's been terribly emotionally draining.  Nothing makes me happy these days.  I feel bone tired, listless.  I have difficulty concentrating, and a persistent dull headache.

But the other day, wearing that red sweater, along with my red wristwatch and some red earrings, I felt my mood lift just a little.  After all, red is the color associated with energy and excitement.  In our culture, it bears connotations of love and desire.  For the Chinese, red symbolizes luck and is the color of celebration.  In chromotherapy (using color as a healing power), red was used to stimulate the body and mind and increase circulation.

I could use a nice big dose of all those things.

I even bought myself a cute red wool jacket, with a coordinating scarf and red fuzzy gloves.  (You would not believe the sale I found, either...)  Now I'm on the lookout for a red purse to complete the ensemble.

I'm talking red to the limit here, folks.

I really am RED all over.

How about you?  Is there a particular color that lifts your spirits and brightens your mood?

Is There a Football Game Today?

I'm being facetious, because I really don't care about football.   In fact, there's nothing in this world that I care less about than football.  At the risk of offending any of you, I think it's a barbaric sport that's stupid and dangerous.  The fact that football players receive totally obscene salaries to run around a field throwing a ball and knocking each other senseless, is, to me, an embarrassing absurdity of modern life. On top of that, they look hideous in those outfits.

Last night, the Musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed in concert at a local church.  The orchestra members are still on strike, since all efforts to reach an equitable settlement have come to naught time and again.  There is a growing sense of desperation among music lovers here in Detroit, who turn out in huge numbers to hear these talented, world class musicians as they turn black and white notes on a page into music of truly heavenly caliber.

At the end of the last round of negotiations, we heard that the orchestra and management were approximately two million dollars apart in their offers, two million dollars away from saving not just this season or this symphony, but the future of the DSO for years to come.

Two million dollars.

You know where I'm going with this, I'm sure.  Two million dollars is a heck of a lot of money to me, and I suspect it is to you.

But it's less than the average annual salary for a member of the New York Giant's football team.

Less than the salary of one football player for one year.

At the beginning of this post, I said I could care less about football.  Even though I don't like it, and don't watch it, I know plenty of people  who do.  That's as it should be.  In America, we  should all have the right to enjoy the things we enjoy, and I defend those rights, even if don't quite comprehend the reasons for them.  I know many people don't appreciate music the way I do.  But I should hope they wouldn't deny me the opportunity to experience the music I love performed by people who are tops in their field.

But that's exactly what's going to happen unless we narrow the gap between our perception of greatness, and stop devaluing artistic endeavor.

Athletes and orchestra musicians are not all that different, you know.  Each one works for years and years to hone their skill, hours of repetitive drill and expensive study, endless grueling practices and rehearsals, traveling from place to place away from their families.  They must learn to work within the structure of the group, follow directions from their leader, and be at their individual best at all times.  At the end of it all, they put on their game day faces and strut onto their respective fields, eager to give the best performance of their lives.

Wouldn't it be nice if every member of the Detroit Lions (where the average annual salary is $1,683,397) would donate a couple of thousand dollars toward keeping the DSO on the stage?  Or if some of Detroit's other professional athletes would join in that initiative?  It's pocket change to them, but it could actually go a long way toward insuring the future of artistic excellence in Detroit city.

During tonight's football game, I will be playing my recordings of the DSO at top volume,  hoping against hope that those CD recordings won't be the only way I'm able to hear these wonderful musicians in the future.

And by the way, they look wonderful in concert attire.

You Can't Always Get What You Want...

...but if you try sometimes, you'll find you get what you need. Good philosophy from the Rolling Stones, proving once again that rock and roll is more than just noise and distraction.

When I was a little girl, I nearly always got what I wanted - at least in terms of things.  Because I was an only child (and an only grandchild), and because my parents were fairly well off  at least in terms of the working class neighborhood where we lived, my wishes were generally granted.  I had every Barbie doll made, with the latest outfits to go with.  I got a new bike every couple of years, the latest and greatest model (I had not one, not two, but three different Sting-Ray bikes with banana seats - a royal blue, a deep purple, and metallic lime green with sparkles.)

There was a brand new car sitting in the driveway with my name on it months before I had the license to drive it.

I know - it sounds like I was the proverbial spoiled little rich kid, doesn't it?

But I think I was kind and generous with my friends, and I hope I never shoved my good fortune in their faces.  Most of my friends came from large families, where money was, if not an issue, at least an object that had to be very carefully considered, and most of them had to work to get the kinds of gifts that were always freely given to me.

Parents are cautioned against giving their children everything they want in life, because then they aren't prepared for the realities of the cruel world where in fact, you can't -and don't and won't -  always get what you want.  Certainly in the course of my life over the past 50 years, there have been times when I didn't get what I wanted.  But I believe that most often, I got what I needed.

I needed to marry young, in order to establish myself in a life away from my parents who were generous but overprotective.  It was the only acceptable way I knew at that time to pry myself loose from a grasp that was loving but too tight.

I needed to have a child, to teach me that my wishes weren't the only ones that mattered, that when you're responsible for the life of another human being you have to sublimate your own desires a great deal of the time.

I needed that child to leave home when he was young, to remind me not to hang on too tight to the people you love, to encourage me to make a life of my own, perhaps for the first time.

I needed both of the "careers" that I've had, one to prove to me that I have talent and shouldn't be so afraid to use it, and to show me how wonderful it is to have friends, to have a real live social network that pulls you out of your introverted shell and pushes you into the world.  The other to show me how the "professional" world works and convince me I have the ability to operate within it.

At this moment, I stand at something of a crossroads.  I feel ready to move on in many areas of my life, yet circumstances seem to keep me rooted in one place.  In the past few years, there have been lots of things I wanted that I didn't get, probably more than at any other time in my life.  People died that I wanted to live, jobs didn't come through that I wanted to get, my family got scattered even farther away.  Sometimes I've felt as if I were walking through a wasteland filled with the remnants of broken dreams.

I'm not yet far enough away from all this to see if I find anything in the wreckage that resembles something I need.

But I'm trying to believe that there is.

After all, who am I to argue with the Rolling Stones?

Winter Hyperbole and Life in General

The meteorologists were slightly off track in terms of inches (10 instead of 15) and timing (it was mostly done by sunrise instead of lasting throughout the day), and there was never even a blip in the power, thanks be to God.  I'm not complaining - if the forecasters must err, let it be on the side of leniency.  That's probably the way they look at it too. But the widespread "snow day" was definitely justified, and I have no compunction about staying in the house and waiting for the snow removal crews to get around to my driveway.  In fact, they can wait until tomorrow for all I care.

So far today I've shoveled a path for the dogs, drunk the majority of two very strong pots of Gevalia coffee (can you say overcaffeinated?), cleaned out my lingerie drawer and mercilessly thrown away a huge pile of old faded undies and slips (when was the last time you wore a full length slip?)  I've just finished tidying up the office/reading room/gym.  This room really needs a name - my friend Melissa (aka The Word Ninja) calls her office The Word Lounge, and I love that, but since that name is obviously taken I need to come up with something of my own.

I'm about to clear out a shelf in the closet where I can store all my writing books.  I have amassed quite a library of books about writing, and I'd like a place to store them, along with the variety of journals and workbooks that become attached to them.  The one I'm reading now - Writing Life Stories, by Bill Roorhbach - has some great ideas and exercises for stimulating memories and writing those memories into stories that relate to life in general.

You know that's what I'm all about over here.

Speaking of life in general - I've been reflecting on how to handle a situation at work.  I haven't been very happy with my job for some time, although I like the people I work with and the office atmosphere.  But I realized yesterday that my 10 year anniversary is coming up, and I've discovered that 10 years is kind of a breaking point for me, the point where I begin to tire of what I'm doing and start itching for something else.  My job has evolved into mostly administrative tasks rather than actual writing, and there is a push to hire another writer so I would be doing even less writing than ever, leaving me time for still more administrative tasks.  I've been dragging my feet on the process of hiring/training another writer, because (1) I dread, dread, dread the training process, which is tedious and long; and (2) I don't want to give up even more of the little bit of writing I now do.

I suppose a talk must be had with the powers that be.  I don't always do well talking (or "verbalizing", as we put it in our medical reports).  As you might guess, I'm much better at self-expression via the written word.  So maybe I'll spend some of my time today writing out the points I need to make.  I'd like to just slip the paper under my boss' door and run - but of course, I can't do that.  As the saying goes, I have to put on my big girl panties and deal with it.

That's my snow day so far...if you're having a snow day, how are you spending it?

On the Horizon

Usually I don't pay much heed to weather predictions.  More often than not, weather forecasting is like reading the National Enquirer - a lot of hyperbole. But the storm that's supposedly on its way through the midwest starting tomorrow night sounds like a doozy, and has me quaking in my proverbial boots.  Over 15 inches of snow is expected, and that's a whole lot more snow than we've seen at one time here in over  35 years.  As a matter of fact, they're comparing it to the blizzard of 1974, one I recall rather well, although I was just a teenager at the time.  It's impact on me was purely self-centered.  All I cared about was that it meant my boyfriend couldn't get home from college to see me, so another endlessly long week would go by before we could be together!

Now that I'm older, my biggest fear about snowstorms (other than having to drive in them, which I've already made sure I won't have to do this time) is losing electricity.  One of the downsides of living on the same street as my 83 year old mother is that if one of us loses power, we both do.  So there's no safe haven.  She's particularly vulnerable to cold and ice, and the last thing she needs is a fall or to catch a bad cold.

But as long as the voltage holds out, we should be okay.

In fact, I rather enjoy an excuse to hunker in for a couple of days, maybe put a pot of soup on to simmer, drink hot cocoa in between rounds of shoveling, and read, read, read.

How about you?  What do you like to do on snow days?